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Most marketers don’t need more data – they need better ways to make sense of it. In this episode, Dana DiTomaso shares how to cut through the confusion of GA4 and build tracking and reporting systems that actually help you make smarter decisions. Whether you’re a numbers nerd or analytics-averse, this conversation will make your data work harder (without making your head hurt).
Stop Obsessing Over Perfect GA4 Data—Here’s What Actually Matters
Analytics perfectionism is killing your marketing decisions.
I see it all the time. Marketing managers hunched over spreadsheets, trying to reconcile why their Google Analytics numbers don’t match their Facebook Ads dashboard. CEOs demanding to know why last month’s conversion rate was 3.2% instead of 3.4%. Teams paralyzed because they can’t trust their data enough to make decisions.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: perfect marketing data never existed. Not in Universal Analytics, not in GA4, and not in any analytics platform you’ll ever use.
Dana DiTomaso, who’s audited hundreds of GA4 installations as a digital analytics expert and University of Alberta instructor, puts it perfectly: “You cannot record everything in any analytics platform, period. It is not possible.”
So if perfect accuracy is a myth, what should we focus on instead?
The Directional Data Revolution
Instead of treating analytics like accounting (where every penny must be accounted for), Dana suggests we approach it directionally. Think of your data as a compass, not a GPS coordinate.
Here’s a simple example that illustrates the power of this approach:
Imagine you have a landing page that receives 10% of your overall website traffic but generates 50% of your conversions. That page is punching way above its weight. Conversely, if another page gets 60% of your traffic but only 10% of conversions, something’s clearly wrong with the user experience.
You don’t need perfect numbers to see this pattern. You need relative comparisons.
Dana’s favorite visualization technique involves two pie charts—one showing conversions by device, another showing sessions by device. “All I want you to look at is do the slices line up with each other,” she explains. If mobile traffic represents 60% of your sessions but only 20% of your conversions, you’ve got a mobile experience problem.
This visual approach works because it doesn’t overwhelm executives (or clients!) with numbers they don’t understand. They can see the colors line up (or not) and immediately grasp whether something needs attention.
The #1 GA4 Mistake Everyone Makes
While Dana sees many GA4 setup errors, one stands out above all others: misconfigured form submissions.
GA4’s enhanced measurement automatically tracks form submissions, which sounds great in theory. The problem? It can’t distinguish between successful form submissions and failed ones. If someone fills out your contact form incorrectly and hits submit, GA4 still records it as a conversion.
Even worse, many sites record internal search queries as form submissions. Every time someone searches your product catalog, it might show up as a lead in your analytics.
“I often see blank form submissions being recorded as a successful form submit because of Ajax technology,” Dana notes. Ajax forms don’t change the URL when submitted—they just show a success or error message on the same page. GA4 sees the form submission event but has no idea whether it succeeded or failed.
The fix is surprisingly simple: Open GA4’s real-time reporting, go to your contact page, and try submitting a blank form. If you see a form submission event appear, you’re recording fake conversions.
To verify your setup, compare form submissions in GA4 to actual leads in your CRM. You should always have more leads in your CRM than form submissions in GA4 (since GA4 can’t track everyone due to ad blockers and privacy settings). If it’s the other way around, something’s off.
The AI Traffic Revolution (That’s Already Happening)
Here’s something else you should know: AI tools are already driving traffic to websites across every industry, and most businesses have no idea it’s happening.
“I’m finding with clients, people are converting who come via AI,” Dana reports. “It’s a very small percentage overall for these companies, but it’s growing rapidly.”
This isn’t limited to tech companies. Dana has seen AI-driven traffic for personal injury lawyers, industrial product manufacturers, and service businesses. People are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI tools for recommendations, and these tools are suggesting real businesses.
The kicker? Most of this traffic shows up as “referral” or gets dumped into GA4’s “unassigned” channel, making it invisible to most marketers.
Dana has created a custom channel grouping that identifies AI traffic using regex patterns. The setup takes about five minutes and automatically categorizes traffic from known AI tools.
What’s fascinating is the quality of this AI traffic. “People who come to site via AI overviews are pretty engaged,” Dana observes. “They tend to look at multiple pages on the website.” This makes sense—if someone clicks through from an AI overview, they’re looking for information beyond what the AI provided.
Reporting That Actually Drives Decisions
The biggest mistake in analytics reporting isn’t technical—it’s psychological. We overwhelm decision-makers with data because we’re insecure about what they want to see.
“It comes from a place of insecurity,” Dana explains. “I don’t know what they’re going to want, so I’m just going to give them everything. That’s the opposite of what they want, because then they’re going to think that you don’t know.”
Instead, lead with your biggest insights. Don’t build up to a dramatic conclusion—start with it. If your mobile conversion rate is terrible, lead with that. If one marketing channel is dramatically outperforming others, make that the headline.
Dana recommends creating specific report collections for different stakeholders. She’ll literally name a reporting section “Mike only looks at this stuff” for clients who want simplified dashboards. This isn’t condescending—it’s useful. Executives want to glance at data and understand whether things are moving in the right direction.
The SparkToro Connection
One tool Dana consistently recommends is SparkToro for audience research. The platform reveals where your audience actually spends time online versus where you think they spend time.
This creates another powerful pie chart opportunity. The inner pie shows where your audience actually hangs out (according to SparkToro data). The outer donut shows where you’re spending your marketing budget. When these don’t align, you’ve found your next strategic opportunity.
“You are spending your money in these places, but based on this audience research, this is where your audience actually is,” Dana explains. “You can clearly see that those slices 100% do not line up at all.”
This insight often leads to recommendations for podcast advertising, newsletter sponsorships, or partnerships with websites where the target audience already engages.
First Step in Improving Your Analytics Reporting in GA4
If you want to improve your analytics approach immediately, Dana suggests starting with form submission verification. Check whether your GA4 setup is recording blank submissions or search queries as conversions. This single fix can dramatically improve your data quality.
Next, audit your “unassigned” traffic channel. Look for valuable traffic sources that GA4 doesn’t recognize because of non-standard UTM parameters or unusual referral patterns. You might find significant traffic hiding in this catch-all category.
Finally, simplify your reporting. Instead of monthly data dumps, create visual comparisons that highlight performance gaps. Focus on directional insights rather than precise measurements.
The Bottom Line
Perfect analytics data is a fantasy. But directional insights that drive better marketing decisions? That’s absolutely achievable.
Stop waiting for perfect data to make marketing decisions. Start using the data you already have to spot patterns, identify problems, and find opportunities. Your analytics don’t need to be perfect—they just need to be useful.
As Dana puts it: “Less is more when it comes to reporting. Let the data breathe, give people time to think about it, ask questions, and start with less. You can always add more later.”
The goal isn’t to become a GA4 expert. It’s to extract insights that make your marketing more effective. And that’s something you can start doing today, imperfect data and all.
GA4 Analytics: Beyond Accuracy to Real Results Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is founder and lead instructor at KP Playbook, and President and partner at Kick Point, where she helps people and teams do better marketing.
Alongside the team at Kick Point, she teaches how to set goals and track results so that you can understand what strategies and tactics bring real value. In addition to speaking at conferences about reporting and analytics, SEO and brand building, she’s the weekly technology columnist on CBC Edmonton and teaches digital analytics at the University of Alberta. Her LinkedIn learning courses have taught over 170,000 learners important digital marketing skills.
In her spare time, she enjoys yelling at football players and collecting hobbies. Today we’re going to be talking about GA4 and better tracking with Dana DiTomaso. Dana, welcome to the podcast.
Dana: Thank you. Everyone’s favorite topic. Everyone loves GA4.
Rich: Exactly. It’s so sexy.
Dana: It’s honestly the best product Google’s ever made.
Rich: I assume you’re not including Google Wave then on that one.
Dana: Yeah. I think about Google Reader. Let’s pour one out for Google Reader. Yeah, that was such a great product. Now I think there was definitely a lot of hate for GA4, deserved or not deserved. I think the timing was not good.
There was this global pandemic thing going on and people didn’t want yet another thing to work on and is half baked when they had to push it out. And so there’s a whole bunch of reasons why GA4 has unnecessarily received some hate. There’s some good things about it, there’s some bad things about it, but we’re going to talk it through.
Rich: Let’s dive right in. What was your path to getting involved in GA4 and all things analytics?
Dana: Yeah, so I have a degree in geography, which I obviously use every single day in my current career. I worked at software companies after university, and then I was fiddling around with websites on the side.
This is in the late nineties, early aughts, and then I got laid off from my job and thought, I’m going to take this six months of severance that I got and just learn how to do websites, set up a website agency. It was just me freelancing. And so I made websites, and my very first client after I launched their website, which I built on Dreamweaver, so I’m really just dating myself here – this was about 25 years ago now – said, “I’m not on Google. How do I get on Google?” And I said, I don’t know. I’ll let you know.
And I found Jill Whalen, who’s now retired from the industry, and Rand Fishkin, and a bunch of the original SEOs. Turns out I’m way better at SEO than I was at making websites. And I got really involved in the SEO industry, and then I did SEO basically exclusively for many years. And then started to slowly get into analytics as clients were wanting better reports as kind of the gold rush of you really had just had to work at SEO a little bit and then things would come in and it’d be great. Now we’re like, oh, now we have to prove our value.
So I actually gave a talk at MozCon 2014 or 2015 called, Per View Value, which sort of started this path. And then analytics has basically become my full-time role. I still have all these years of SEO in my brain, and I still do a little SEO now and again, but analytics is my primary focus.
And what I find is that in terms of GA4, it just came along at a time when I was really doubling down in analytics. So now I’m a GA4 expert, which was unexpected, but that’s what happened. And yeah, long way from geography for sure.
Rich: All right, so let’s jump in with both feet. How accurate is GA4, and maybe by extension, any modern website analytics platform?
Dana: Yeah, let me give an SEO answer, “It depends”. I would say that GA4 is as accurate as it can be given the circumstances. And this goes for any analytics platform. You cannot record anything, everything, in any analytics platform, period. It is not possible. There are too many barriers in the way, most of them technology based. Ad blockers, consent management tools, right? Those are the big two people having weird user journeys, right? You just can’t track everything, and you were never able to track everything.
There might’ve been one moment in 2004 when you could track everything, and then tabs were introduced and that was the end of that, right? So I think that there’s a real fallacy that we are somehow data accountants, when the reality is we’re really just looking at directional data.
So I would like people to talk less about accuracy and instead look more at directional signals when it comes to things like GA4. But again, GA4 presents things as if they’re very precise and specific and accurate, but a lot of times it’s just like fairytales, especially if your analytics is set up wrong, which I see all the time.
People firing multiple times in the same page, not recording some pages, recording one event one way and another event another way. I see, especially in particular for example, if people are recording conversions for Google ads and Facebook ads and an event in GA4, but they have different triggers for all those different events, so they’re not actually all recording the same thing.
And then on top of that, different analytics tools record things in different ways, which is why I think one of the reasons why people hated the UA to GA4 transition. Because when you double tagged your site to have UA and GA4 running at the same time, you’d suddenly realize, oh my God, this is different data. One of these is wrong. No, they’re both right. It’s just they’re measuring things in different ways.
It’s like Schrodinger’s analytics, right? It’s like everything is correct, it’s just how you decide to look at it. That’s why I tell people never compare Facebook ads versus GA4. They’re measuring different things in different ways, and every analytics property has its own little priorities of what it measures.
Google is obviously a Google property. GA4 is part of the ADS team, so they’re very focused on Google ads. Facebook would like you to give them as much money as possible. They’re just focused on Facebook ads, right? So any of those analytics platforms, unless you build your own or roll your own, have their own ways of recording stuff.
And there’s lots of different analytics platforms out there. I’m not saying by any means you have to use GA4. A lot of what I talk about when it comes to things like good reporting and measuring the right stuff that can be applied anywhere, I don’t really care which tool you use. Use the tool that makes the most sense for you.
I think one of the better tools out there right now is actually customer journey analytics from Adobe. I think Google should be a little scared about that because it can do some great stuff including import GA4 data. So I think if you’re using Google Ads, you kind of got to use GA4. Maybe it isn’t necessarily your primary tool of choice when it comes to reporting. That’s okay, but you should still make sure it’s set up properly. So that’s what I tell people. The accuracy is only as good as the setup that you put into it.
Rich: You mentioned the idea of approaching analytics directionally. Can you explain what that means for people who just assumed that everything was accurate because it seemed so factual?
Dana: Yeah. Yeah. So for sure it’s the idea of, I’ve been really trying to change how people report. I actually have a blog post on my website on kpplaybook.com called, Marketing Analytics Data is Wrong. Can it be fixed? Spoil alert? No, it can’t. But what you could do is report differently.
And one of the things I’d really try to focus on is, for example, let’s say you have a set of landing pages and a set of conversions, and you want to report on conversions by landing page. So normally you would say, this landing page got a hundred visits, and it had 50 conversions. Spectacular.
Instead, what I want you to do is I want you to report on it as a percentage of the whole, this particular landing page received 10% of your overall sessions, but it had 50% of the overall conversions. This landing page is spectacular. This other landing page had 60% of the overall visits, but only 10% of the conversion. Something is wrong with this landing page. And so that’s where you can look at that directional data and just really see where things are going, like which one is punching above or below its weight.
Another thing that I’ll often do as well, and this podcast was kind of hard to illustrate, but I do this on the radio all the time, so we’ll give it a shot. So imagine two pie charts. We have a pie chart in the middle, and then we have a donut outside of that pie chart. The inner pie is conversions by device. The outer donut is sessions by device. And all I want you to look at is do the slices lineup with each other. So if there’s 33% of desktop traffic, do I have 33% of the conversions from desktop? Yes, no. Is it relatively close or is it completely off? And then if it’s completely off, you know that something is wrong with the experience for those particular users.
And often when I present those kinds of charts, especially to leadership, I don’t actually include any numbers on it. We’re just looking at the size of the slices. I’m not saying it’s 33% or whatever it might be. I’m just saying look at the size of the slices because that visually is easy for people who don’t do analytics to understand. They can see how the colors line up. Check if people are colorblind first, of course, or use colorblind friendly layouts. And it doesn’t feel like you’re talking over them.
So I think that this is where, as analysts and as SEOs too, in particular, we love tables. But people who are not us normal human beings who just want to know if things are going in the right direction, don’t like tables. So the more you can do to get away from a table or make a table visual, like I like including bar charts within my tables all the time or heat maps. That can really improve that experience for people. And the simpler you can make it saying, look at the colors, do they line up? That is the simplest chart you can possibly make.
And we’ve had people approve website redesign projects just based on a chart like that where they can see that their mobile session rate is very high, but their mobile conversion rate is very poor. Easy choice. Yes, your site sucks on mobile. Let’s fix it.
Rich: So that sounds like a new insight, something that’s going to make it really easy. But like even in the example you gave me, how do I know that my desktop is really crushing it and mobile’s doing really poorly? Or is it just that desktop is crushing it, mobile’s doing fine, but maybe it just seems like those numbers are skewed. How do you deal with situations like that if you’re not looking at the exact numbers?
Dana: Yeah. So what I’m thinking about is, especially when we think about things like ad blockers and consent management, if someone says no, being no to being tracked, I’m not going to see them show up in the sessions or the conversions, right? And in this case too, I’ve set up the analytics. I know the conversions are recording things properly, period. So you also have to make sure that sessions, that’s a yes/no sort of binary. Was there a session? Yes there was. No, there wasn’t. And in a GA4 audit course, which I’ll actually mention at the end that I’m just putting out now, one of the things I look at is, are there changes in composition, like radical changes in composition over time?
Suddenly you stop recording Safari users, like something has happened, there’s been a JavaScript error, now you stop recording those people. So that kind of diagnostic is also really important to have. But again, that’s not directional. It’s just oh, this number fell off a cliff. Something is wrong. I’m not looking at, oh, there’s a 2% decrease in Safari users, sound the alarm. No, no. It’s, it went from this many to zero, something horrible has happened. So I think that’s, again, it’s directional as in it went into the tank.
But I think when you’re thinking about instrumentation, making sure that your sessions are recording when they can record, your conversions are recording when they can record, and then you’re just comparing the two. So if somebody says no to being tracked, either through an ad block or through consent management, you can’t actually track them if they say no to being tracked through consent management. If you want to get around ad blockers, you could use something called server-side tracking, but that only works up to a point.
Realistically, you just want to track the heck out of anyone who lets you track them. And then being able to compare, we know that this is the percentage of people that has tracked them. As well some cookie tools, like I use cookie bot for example, that’s our tool of choice, will tell you how many people said no to being tracked. So we can also say that 50% of people come to the website, say no to tracking, and what we get in GA4 is only 50% of the overall people coming to the website. So then we can also extrapolate out from there and get a sense of how many sessions might you actually have.
Rich: Dana, when you’re saying that they opted out of cookies, are we talking about when I see the banner at the top or the bottom of the page and I literally say no to cookies? Or is it also because some people have tools built into their computer where they’re just not being tracked or I tell Apple that I don’t want to be tracked, and so my assumption is I’m just not being tracked. Is that taking into consideration both of those audiences?
Dana: Yep. All of that. So if you have a consent banner and somebody says no to being tracked. And I have to be honest, I audit a lot of consent management setups, I’ve never seen one right the first time. They’re always doing something wrong. So please double check that if people say no to being tracked, you’re not actually tracking them. Just don’t get fined.
And I talk to marketing, particularly CMOs, all the time who are like, oh, okay they said no to being tracked. We can track something, right? No, you can’t. It said no, you can’t track them. That’s that, right? You just can’t track them.
So it is a consent banner. It’s somebody choosing to use some of the features in iOS, for example. And in iOS actually, it’s interesting because you can allow tracking, but then you can say, hide my location. And then if you look at cities, everybody shows up that they’re from like some random data center like Ashburn, Washington, for example, is really popular.
So you know, in Canada we have Montreal suddenly like huge amount of users. No, it’s just all these Apple people hiding their location. Often I’ll say if you want actual attribution and you want to know what’s correct, just look at Chrome users. Because Google, of course, wants to track everything all the time. So ignore those pesky Safari people with their nice tracking protections.
Rich: So you mentioned that you run into a lot of situations where you see that the GA4 has not been set up correctly. And I’m guessing that although we have listeners who are real GA4 aficionados, and analytics for most of us, we’re just interested in getting some data points back. We’re trying to make some better decisions. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see when people are setting up GA4, and what are some of the probably most important low hanging fruit reports or setups that we should be considering when we get started?
Dana: Yeah, I would say the number one thing to check is one of the thing that I like about GA4 is includes those enhanced measurement events right away. Things like file download and video views, that you couldn’t record without setting up something in Google Tag Manager previously with Universal Analytics. Really appreciate that.
What I don’t like is that you have to have a little bit of knowledge just to make sure it’s recording properly. In particular, the form submit event is a real problematic one because when you think of a form submit, you’re thinking about filling out a contact form and hitting submit.
But the reality is like an onsite search form on your website is also a form. Typically that people submit. So you could be recording form, submit events, which most people set as a key event slash conversion, because that seems important. But it could be recording onsite searches. It could be recording. I often see blank form submissions being recorded as a successful form submit because of a technology called Ajax.
And Ajax forms are when the page doesn’t change or go anywhere, the URL doesn’t change when you hit submit, it just comes up and says thanks, or it comes up with an error, but nothing actually changes. And the reason why GA4 will still record a successful form submit with an Ajax form is because it doesn’t actually know if the form was submitted or not properly. It just knows that a form submission happened. It doesn’t know if the status was a success or a failure.
So what I always say to people is open up GA4, watch the real time events coming in. Go to your contact page, hit the button to submit a form, and then see if a form submit shows up. And if it does, then you’re recording blank form submissions, so you’re probably over recording form submits.
Another thing you can do as well is if you have a CRM software, you can compare the number of leads you have in your CRM versus the number of form submit events. You should almost always see more leads in your CRM than you should see form submission events. If it’s the other way around, you just have more form submits in GA four than you do in your CRM, then something is wrong with your configuration.
Rich: Okay. And so when you get in there, I know that there’s some built-in ones that you like, but what are some of the first things that you add to GA4, some of those custom reports?
Dana: Yeah. One of the first ones I always add is looking at unassigned traffic and what the source medium is of that unassigned traffic. The unassigned channel in GA4 is what other was universal analytics? It’s like the junk drawer of GA4. Just like anything GA4 doesn’t know what to do with it, just tosses in the section because it might be useful later.
But the problem is that sometimes really good traffic ends up in that unassigned channel, because people use sources or mediums that are not corresponding with a default, built in sources of mediums in GA4. And so I do have a totally free UTM tagging guide on my website, which will walk you through how to set this up, how to set up custom channel groups so you can capture that stuff. And just like what to look for unassigned traffic.
One of the very first reports I look at is looking at that unassigned traffic and seeing is there anything valuable stuck in there, like somebody spelled referral wrong, and so now it’s not going to the referral channel anymore, it’s just going elsewhere.
Another thing that I often set up right away is I’ll create a channel to pull out AI traffic into its own channel group away, because it usually shows up as referral or unassigned. I also have a post on my website on how to do that.
And then something else, if the client is Google Tag Manager, then something else I also set up right away, because AI overviews are such a huge hot topic right now. One of the things that you can track is, I don’t know if people have noticed this, but when you click through to your website or someone else’s website from an AI overview, often the text is highlighted of what the thing that was in the AI overview. If that text is highlighted, you’ll notice in the URL there’s just tilled colon equals et cetera, part at the top.
I have again, another post on my website with JavaScript code that you can use to grab the values of that and save it in GA4 as a custom event so you can see probably what people searched for that generated the AI overview that brought people to your website. And then I typically will set up an audience to track people who came to site via AI overviews.
And what I’m finding, at least anecdotally, for the people I’ve set it up for, people who come to site via AI overviews are pretty engaged. They tend to look at multiple pages on the website. So if you can get them to your site from an AI review, they tend to stick around and hopefully buy some stuff.
Rich: That actually makes a lot of sense because, you know, the answer is right there. And this is why we lose so much traffic. Because Google has scraped all the best data from us and they’re just feeding it as if it was their own without giving us credit. They do give us credit in the footnotes. If somebody actually clicks through to that, then it shows they actually want to get some more information. So that’s interesting.
Speaking of AI, it’s hard not to speak of AI these days. I have been noticing, anecdotally, we’ve gotten quite a few leads recently where I asked the client, the prospect, how did you hear about us? Gemini, Bing, Co-pilot have recommended us. And then I’m always like, could you please tell me the prompt you put in there, or the question that you asked? But what kind of GA4 reporting can we think about to maybe capture what is the growing percentage of people who are finding us through LLMs?
Dana: Yeah, so that’s that post I mentioned on our website that shows you how to set up a channel in GA4 to look at that traffic. So what you do is you just create a custom channel group like you would for any other channel, so it shows up like organic search or paid search or whatever.
And you have one for AI tools, and what you do, I have a step-by-step walkthrough my website. It takes about five minutes. I show you exactly how to do it. So if you’re like, I’m scared of doing this. No, it’s easy. I promise. Just watch the video. Hit pause lots, you’ll be fine.
And I have a very long piece of regex that you copy and paste into the field. I already wrote it, so you don’t have to. And by “I” I mean AI helped me write it. And you paste that in, and it grabs all the AIs that we’re aware of at this point, they’re sending traffic to websites. And then again, you can create an audience and say, show me people who’ve come to the site via AI tools because I want to monitor them.
And I’m finding with clients, people are converting who come via AI. It’s a very small percentage overall for these companies, but it’s growing rapidly. Do I think it’s going to overtake SEO anytime soon? Probably not. But it’s definitely a channel you can’t be ignoring. And these are clients who have done exactly nothing when it comes to making sure that they show up at AIs, they just happen to be coming up because they’re on some recommended lists or whatever it might be.
And it’s all sorts of industries like personal injury lawyers, selling industrial products, it’s all over the place. So don’t think your industry is immune from this or people aren’t asking AIs about it, because they are, and they’re probably getting to your website already.
Rich: Yeah, I think people are becoming more and more comfortable asking these AI tools for advice, for insight, as if the AI has some personal experience that’s not found on Reddit or Yelp, or any of these, or Google.
Dana: Because the AI never says ‘no’. They never say, oh, I don’t know. The AI is always like yes, absolutely. Even if it’s confidently wrong, they never say no.
Rich: Confidently wrong, yes. I did get a list of Bollywood movies that I need to watch, however, because I was suddenly interested in Bollywood. So there’s that.
So you had some great examples earlier. You mentioned about using the pie charts as ways of explaining to people who may not know the ins and outs of analytics – what’s working, what’s not working on the site? Here at flyte, we do in-depth reports every month for a lot of our clients. In analytics we use GA4, we use Google Looker Studio, of course we have Google Tag Manager installed and Microsoft Clarity.
I’m just wondering, as you’re preparing, we’re obviously doing it more than maybe an internal person who has 12 other jobs as the head of marketing does. What are some of the reports that you feel are most important when trying to, as you said in the name of your presentation, proving your value? What would you bring to the CFO or the CEO to show that the marketing is actually working or is not working?
Dana: Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the biggest things is just dial back on the level of information that you’re giving and lead with the most important stuff. Don’t save it at the end like you’re building up to this big, exciting moment, right? Just start with the big stuff right out the gate, and really try to think about, how can you tie your work directly to business value. So that can require some sitting down and thinking about it.
For example, are the posts that you’re putting on your website, are they bringing value in? Do people who see a post and convert? And so for example, in GA4 you can create a couple of segments, people who do see your resources section and people who don’t. And then compare the volume of key events for each of those particular audiences, for example.
So in this case, I would do a segment overlap. And one segment would be people who saw resources. Another segment would be people who didn’t. And a third segment would be people who had a key event. And then just look at the percentage of the Venn diagram and how it’s going. Like just showing that would be really interesting, for example. And you think, oh, that’s too simple, I don’t want to show that. That is exactly the kind of thing that a CMO or a CEO wants to see. Because they just want to look at one thing and be like, okay, yes, I can understand this and I can see that we’re going in the right direction, or, it doesn’t seem to matter if people see resources or not.
Or maybe the Venn diagram is people who don’t see resources barely convert at all, which really shows the value of your work, for example. And then other stuff that I’ve recommended to people is things like, if you can somehow tie it to revenue, we’ve noticed that our site speed is slipping. I want to get a consultant here to improve our LCP. We believe that with an increase in rate, we can get X number more dollars, for example.
Or sometimes when I’ve tried to convince people about creating audiences for remarketing, I’ve been like, if you don’t create these audiences for remarketing, we are going to be targeting people who already bought our stuff. And we suspect at this point that we’re wasting X number of dollars in rev, in spend on people who have already purchased our products, right?
So really trying to tie it to value in terms of money you’re saving the company or money you’re making the company, and just lead with that big thing first. What’s that one thing that you want them to confidently walk away from the presentation? And this is where AI is actually really helpful, too. I use it quite often when I’ve put together a deck or a talk or something else. I feed it into AI and say, tell me what the major takeaways are. I don’t tell it anything else, I just ask it that. And then if it comes back with my document or recording or whatever it is and has the takeaways that I wanted it to have, great. If not, you got to go back and revise.
The other thing, too, that we really focus on is making our reports always accessible. This is where Looker Studio is great because if a client wants to check something out, they don’t need to wait for a meeting with us, they can just go and look at stuff. We always give people some basic things to look at. And if they want to look in GA4, great. I’ll make some reports and sometimes I’ll just name the reporting collection like “Mike only look at this stuff”. And then Mike only looks at that stuff, for example. It’s just an easy way to show, here’s the things that I want you to look at and make some reports for them specifically.
Rich: Yeah, I think sometimes we overwhelm decision makers with too much data, and that’s not going to help them at all.
Dana: And I think too, it comes from a place of insecurity of I don’t know what they’re going to want, so I’m just going to give them everything. And that’s the opposite of what they want, right? Because then they’re going to think that you don’t know, and you’re just hoping to tap dance your way out of this uncomfortable situation, right? The reality is absolutely less is more when it comes to reporting. Let the data breathe, give people time to think about it, ask questions, and start with less. And then you can always add in more later.
Rich: Yeah. Let the data breathe. I love that. Now I know you like SparkToro. How do audience research tools like that fit into our picture of how our marketing is working?
Dana: Yeah. I love SparkToro for looking at things like, where’s our audience actually hanging out? And actually, Rand has a great presentation. Rand Fishkin, who’s one of the co-creators of SparkToro. He has a great presentation he has been taking around to conferences this year about where people hang out versus where we spend our money, or where we think people hang out. And actually, I talked to him after one presentation. I said, “What you should do is you should take the pie and then you put the donut around it. And the donut around is going to be where people think they hang out. And the pie is where they actually hang out.”
And that’s actually been really effective, too, when we’re talking to clients and saying, “you are spending your money in these places, but then based on this audience research, this is where your audience actually is”. And you can clearly see that those slices 100% do not line up at all, and so I think that’s where it really helps to convince people maybe we should be trying to get you on a podcast or spend money on podcast advertising. Or, “Here’s these six websites that your audience already is. What can we do to sponsor this particular website or sponsor a newsletter” or whatever it might be? So I think it makes sense.
AI really leans into this idea that brand building, I think, is really important. Again, finally back in the olden days of advertising, it was just like, people have to see your brand 17 times before they go ahead and buy your product. It almost feels like we’re back at that again. Because if you keep searching for things, you keep getting AI overviews. You may not click through, but you might see the brand name.
Eventually, they’re going to say, “Wow, I keep seeing this KP Playbook come up. I guess they know what they’re doing when it comes to GA4. I’m going to check them out now” And that could be a branded search at that point because they’ve gotten to know you. So don’t discount just coming up in an AI review. Just because you didn’t get the click doesn’t mean you’re not necessarily going to get the business down the road.
Rich: Alright. Another tool, we’ve had Aaron Weiche on, from Leadferno, on the show a couple of times, and I know you are a fan of their platform.
Dana: Love it.
Rich: As a fast conversion booster, what makes it so effective in your mind?
Dana: It just is honestly, every single client we’ve added it to, has immediately seen a boost in conversion rate. Like it captures things that would get lost otherwise.
And the best example I gave is for one of our clients called Einstein Moving. They’re a moving company in Texas, and they have a really fantastic flow where people can actually book their moves with a real date and time and everything online, which is unusual for the moving industry. Usually you’ve got to call and stuff. And one of the things that we found was that people were dropping off, so we added Leadferno to the entire website.
But where it’s used the most is that booking process where people will say, “actually, I do have a piano. I found when I put in the piano, I couldn’t get a quote. What can I do with this?” Or “I need to move tomorrow, and you don’t have any dates for tomorrow. Can you guys sneak me in?” Or whatever it might be. It’s helping them recapture business where they would’ve said, ugh, “I’ve got to call or fill out a form. I can’t be bothered to do that.” They would just leave. It makes it so easy for people to get in touch with you.
I haven’t talked a lot of B2B businesses into using it yet, but I think there is potential in the B2B space. Because in B2B, you’re still marketing to people. And there’s nothing B2B people hate more than filling out a form and immediately getting a phone call from a salesperson. A text is so much less obtrusive. So I think there is value in this tool for many different applications, not just for the home services business, where Aaron definitely had his first clients and started out. But all of our clients that have had Leadferno is great.
And Aaron, his team are so approachable. When they were setting up their GA4 events, they actually emailed them to me and said, what do you think? And I was able to go back and be like, this is actually what you should name all of them. This is how they should be set up so that it’s a really fantastic, detailed list of events you get in GA4 from the Leadferno integration. And again, you can build audiences based on all sorts of different Leadferno events happening. So yeah, huge fan.
Rich: Awesome. If there was one thing that somebody could do today to start getting better reporting tomorrow, what would that thing be?
Dana: I would absolutely consider, I would check your forms. Honestly, that’s the number one thing I would look at, I would check your forms. Make sure you’re not over-reporting your form traffic. Because the sad thing about it is that you’re going to see less form submission events. You’re going to think, oh no, they’re going to think I’m doing a bad job, but you’re just correcting a problem that was always there. The old traffic was indeed made up, or the old conversions were made up. So definitely check your forms.
And then the other major mistake that I see people make is when it comes to YouTube videos, GA4 by default only records YouTube videos because YouTube’s the only video player out there, right? There’s no other video play applications. But there’s a piece of code you need to add to your YouTube embeds for them to automatically be recorded in GA4’s enable J-S-A-P-I equals one. You just need to add it to the end of your YouTube embeds. I see that people skip that step and then their videos aren’t recorded.
So if you have YouTube videos on your site, you don’t see video events in your GA4, you definitely need to add that. If you look for my GA4 audit dashboard, just search your GA4 Audit Playbook, that’ll come up for you. And I have the actual code and where to put it in that post as well.
Rich: Awesome. I’m sure you’ve blown a few minds out there. If people want to learn more about you, your courses, your UTM tagging guide, where can we send them online?
Dana: I would say that LinkedIn is the place that I’m the most. And there’s only two Dana DiTomaso’s. The other one has a hyphenated last name and is a teacher in Pueblo, so don’t add her. I think Google’s figured out there’s many different ways to spell DiTomaso, so just kind of spell it how you feel it, and I’ll come up. Don’t worry about that.
And then kpplaybook.com is my main website. So we have the UTM guide. If you click on resources, you’ll see that there. And then I have a new course that’s coming out by the time this is out, which is for GA4 audits as well. So if you just want to learn how to do a GA4 audit, it’s $79. It’s a very quick course, but it includes all the templates and everything that I use, and I walk you through exactly how to do an audit step-by-step. So that’s a great way to just take an afternoon and audit your GA4, which is really what anyone wants to do on a pleasant summer afternoon is audit their GA4.
Rich: It’s how I like to relax with a cold beer in my hands. Absolutely.
Dana: Absolutely. Who doesn’t, really?
Rich: Awesome. Dana, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for stopping by today.
Dana: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Show Notes:
Dana DiTomaso helps businesses so smarter marketing through better measurement. Head on over to the website for a bunch of excellent resources to help you get the most bang out of your analytics data.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.
Resources:
- GA4 Audit course: https://kpplaybook.com/google-analytics-audit-course/
- Track Traffic from AI Tools in GA4: https://kpplaybook.com/resources/how-to-report-on-traffic-from-ai-tools-in-ga4/
- Track Traffic from AI Overviews in GA4: https://kpplaybook.com/resources/how-to-track-traffic-from-aio-featured-snippets-paa-results-ga4/
- Marketing Analytics Data is Wrong, Can It Be Fixed?https://kpplaybook.com/resources/marketing-analytics-data-is-wrong-can-it-be-fixed/